Serving as a useful index of the current state of Senecan studies, Seneca Philosophus is the outgrowth of an international conference that was held at the American University of Paris in May 2011. The book, expensive but generally well produced, with the exception of some typos, font issues and relics of the editing process, presents seventeen essays (eleven from the conference itself with six additional contributions) on a wide variety of topics, ranging from technical philosophical problems to literary readings. In addition to a short introduction, the volume includes several indices, including an index locorum which is essential in a book with so many contributions. Since space here is limited, I can only provide a brief description of the topic and the argumentation of each essay.

The papers naturally fall into three groups. The first concerns Seneca Philosophus as philosopher. The first two contributions examine the concept of prolepsis from different angles. Ilsetraut Hadot argues (against B. Inwood, Reading Seneca: Stoic Philosophy at Rome (2005)) that Seneca's view of prolepsis at Ep. 120 is not an innovative response by Seneca, influenced by Platonic innatism, but is prefigured already in the earliest Stoics. By contrast, Antonello Orlando's philological study does not focus on Seneca's philosophical affiliations, but on the lexical choices that Seneca makes when translating the concept relative to those made by his predecessor Cicero. Seneca, a ‘genuine utilitarian’ (59), is responding to the needs of his Roman readers. Inspired by Gill's 1983 article on Chrysippus' study of Euripides' Medea (Phronesis 28, 136–49), Jörn Müller analyses Seneca's Medea as an exploration of how Stoics accounted for akrasia within a monistic psychological framework. Reviewing the ‘persistence model’ and the ‘oscillation model’, Müller proposes that the latter explains Medea's actions best; readers will have to decide whether Seneca's play can legitimately be viewed as a study of Stoic psychology. In a similar vein, but focusing on Seneca's prose works, is Marcia Colish's study ‘Seneca on acting against conscience’, which explores the ways in which Seneca and other Roman Stoics approached self-reflection and praemeditatio futurorum malorum. David Kaufman, analysing De Ira 2.1–4, boldly argues that Seneca's theory that one can only treat people gripped by a violent emotion by stimulating a rival emotion in them — as opposed to belief-based therapies offered by Cleanthes and Chrysippus — is a Senecan innovation based on a Stoic interpretation of Epicurean evocatio. Gareth Williams examines the Epistulae Morales and the Naturales Quaestiones as works that can be read in combination as ‘interdependent conceptual experiments’ (137) — thus offering complementary therapeutic approaches not unlike the arsenal of tools offered by modern cognitive-behavioural therapy.

The second group of essays treat a number of social and political issues. Rita Degl'Innocenti Pierini's sprawling article, ‘Freedom in Seneca’, offers a series of reflections on libertas in Seneca's prose works. Starting from Seneca's portrayal of Cicero's ‘weak’ attempt at freedom in the political sphere (semiliber, Brev. 5.3), Degl'Innocenti Pierini highlights Seneca's depiction of Cato as an embodiment of libertas, one that finds its valence in the private sphere removed from the vagaries of the political world. Jean-Christophe Courtil offers the first systematic study of the 259 references to torture and physical punishment in Seneca's prose works, identifying a clear distinction between torture and ‘corrective’ corporal punishment. A provocative article by Tommaso Gazzari examines Ep. 95.15–23, in which Seneca strategically outlines gender-coded pathologies caused by the misuse of food, which in turn mirror the decay of female morality. Suicide, by contrast, is a healthy masculine response — resulting in a paradox of health in death. Rounding out this group of papers, Elizabeth Gloyn traces the presence of family members in the Epistulae Morales. While the overall thesis — that Seneca avoids references to family in the early section of the collection ‘for the reader's own safety’ (255) and gradually reintroduces them as the reader gains philosophical expertise — seems forced, one can still appreciate the comprehensiveness of the study.

The third and final group consists of essays that explore the intersection of literature, rhetoric and philosophy. One article stands out for being out of place: Martin Dinter's catalogue of sententiae in Seneca Tragicus, which serve as ‘the readers’ digest … [of] Senecan tragedies' (319). The notion that sententiae reinforce key themes in the tragedies does not seem novel. Also uninspiring is Matheus De Pietro's reading of De Vita Beata 1.1.–6.2, which sees the multiple descriptions of happiness and the summum bonum not as incoherent repetition, but as a display of Seneca's expertise as a Stoic philosopher. Francesca Romana Berno presents a persuasive analysis of Seneca's exemplary use of Q. Aelius Tubero at Ep. 95.72–3 and 98.13; in contrast with Cicero's critical portrayal of Tubero's commitment to poverty at the expense of his political career, Seneca rewrites Tubero as a figure of consistency and worthy of praise. Whether this rewriting is part of Seneca's painful deliberation over retirement, as Berno asserts, can never be determined and runs the risk of biographical fallacy.

A number of articles in the final group concern the ways in which Seneca employs specific literary and rhetorical strategies to fashion his authorial presence in his works. Madeleine Jones presents the innovative view that Seneca purposefully constructs his persona as a hypocrite in the Epistulae Morales as part of his strategy to deal with the ‘practical impasses of a Stoic's life’ (410). Linda Cermatori offers a useful survey of the motif of ‘philosopher-as-artist’ in Seneca's works as a reflection of his own meta-literary identity as philosopher and mentor. Like Gunderson's book below, Crematori equates Seneca-as-author and his letters (opus) with god-as-creator and his divine creation of the world (also opus). Soon, however, Cermatori veers wildly, like Hippolytus' horses, into the world of Seneca's Phaedra, which, in her view, offers perverted portrayals of this image of the philosopher-educator. Margaret Graver's article on Ep. 84, focusing on the key concept of ingenium, aims to put Foucault's reading of the letter on firm philological ground and maps out a ‘novel ontology of the self’ (270). On Graver's subtle reading, self-fashioning in writing becomes the self actualized. Thus, the way to transcendence is through the proper rational life transmitted through the act of writing — writing that replaces the unstable bodily self with a more stable and admirable externalized self. In the final essay of the book, Jula Wildberger analyses the ‘Epicurus trope’ in Seneca's Epistulae Morales. Distinguishing between the author ‘L. Annaeus’ and the letter-writer ‘Seneca’, Wildberger notes that Epicurus' presence recurs at crucial turning points in ‘Seneca's' mode of thinking and endows the work with a dramatic structure as we move from a naive acceptance to a more subtle understanding of Stoicism. The employment of Epicurus is, then, a conscious modelling on the part of the master author to dramatize the philosophical life and to provide an ‘appealing model of how [the Roman élite] might embark into an exemplary philosophical life themselves' (461).

If Seneca Philosophus is challenging to review because of its breadth, Erik Gunderson's The Sublime Seneca is difficult to assess for other reasons: the density of thought, the application of multiple modern critical theories, the self-indulgent writing and the almost stream-of-consciousness approach to a subject or text. Those familiar with G.'s other books will not be surprised by such an appraisal; the book is as much a display of G.'s agile wit as it is about Seneca, and therein lies the problem. One must often read through G. to get at Seneca (or “Seneca” or Seneca₂ or Lucilius-as-a-second-Seneca), and after some 150 pages of G. the reader feels more than a wee bit spent and Seneca seems wie Gespenst.

The explicit goal of the book is to explore the ‘relationship between ethics, literature, and metaphysics in the writings of Seneca’ (1). G. eschews the methodology of looking at the philosophical facts that are presented in Seneca's works, but rather focuses on how the texts themselves work to promote the enactment of the ethical life. Thus, G. prefers to focus on the ‘when, where, how and why Seneca presents the question “how should I live”’ (3). For G., then, it is Seneca's deployment of stories and his method(s) of storytelling that are paramount, and it is through modern critical approaches that one can best get at Seneca's philosophical project; at various points, G. draws liberally on Foucault, Bal, Derrida, Kant (and especially a Lacanian response to Kant by Zupančič) and Irigaray. Although G. wants us to see the book as a coherent whole, I would rather characterize it as a constellation of readings of selected texts that somewhat erratically orbit around the concept of the sublime, which G. uses in both the literary and metaphysical senses (only to collapse the two at various points).

The first four chapters could be called ‘the ascent to the sublime’ and offer a series of studies on how literature can translate and metaphorically transfer the readers' perspective upward toward the sublime — and even imagine themselves looking at themselves from this privileged perspective. After a subtle reading of Ep. 108 that underscores the dangers of misreading philosophy — which must be internalized — we get to the core of his argument in the next three chapters. In ch. 2 (‘Writing Metaphysics’) G. examines Ep. 58, famous for its presentation of Platonic ontology, arguing that the long exposition on metaphysics exemplifies rather ‘the logic of letters’, that is, the logic of translation and metaphor (55). Indeed, the chapter is a meditation on the journey between the here and now (idos) and the ‘up there’ (idea), mediated by a solicitous author. This leads to ch. 3 (‘The Nature of Seneca’), a narratological analysis of selected passages in NQ (7.27.5, 2.6.6, 2.45.1–3, 1.4.1–2, 1.pr.12–13, 1.16.4–9) that confronts the idea/idea of authorship head-on, and ch. 4 (‘The Spectacle of Ethics’), a consideration of the multiple possible perspectives in the spectatorship of ethics starting from Ep. 7, the famous letter on Seneca's day at the Roman games.

Although G. is particularly good at delineating the numerous voices and narratological layers of a text (Seneca as author, narrator, character, divided self, ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘you’ and so on), throughout these chapters G. is engaged in a sophisticated sleight-of-hand, ‘rewriting Seneca when it suits [his] own needs’ and ‘forging “improper” associative links’ — the very methodologies that G. warns us that he will employ in the introduction (8). One struggles to see how Seneca's presentation of Platonic metaphysics naturally leads to a meditation on the metaphysics of authorship. According to G., the author Seneca (cf. Cermatori and Wildberger above) becomes the unreachable, metaphysical equivalent to god, the artifex mundi, who ‘quietly slips into a privileged metaphysical slot of his own’ (46). Similarly, Seneca's depiction of the optics of the rainbow (NQ 1.4.1–2) is not to be taken (only) at face value, but reflects the very nature of Seneca's text, which pulls from numerous genres and presents a panoply of narrative voices and characters (67–8). Since one cannot look at the sun (= author), one must contemplate the rainbow itself (= narrator's work). It very well may be that G.'s concept of the metaphysics of Senecan authorship is a productive way to look at his philosophical project, but the texts themselves seem to be nothing more than convenient pegs on which to hang a specifically Gundersonian thought experiment.

If the first four chapters offer the path to Seneca's version to enlightenment, the last three offer what are promised to be ‘cautionary tales’ that serve as counterpoints to the ‘literary and theatrical solutions’ (2) attained so far. Although G. offers sensitive readings of individual texts, it is hard to discern how they, especially the tragedies, fit in with the architecture of the first four. Particularly subtle is G.'s portrayal of the necessary loss of Helvia's gender to reach a state of ‘apathetic spectatorship’ (ch. 5 on Cons. Helv.), and the analyses of the Phaedra (‘a philosophical burlesque’, ch. 6) and Hercules (ch. 7) from a Lacanian/Kantian perspective (‘the beautiful’ vs. ‘the sublime’) reveal a space for asking illicit philosophical questions, such as whether the sublime perspective is realizable or just a Stoic fantasy. Perhaps even a Hercules, for all his virtue, cannot make the ‘impossible leap’ (146) that can get him to the other side.

In the end, G. successfully articulates the inextricable tie between literature and philosophy in Seneca's works, and there is much food for thought here about the attainability of the sublime perspective and literature's rôle in mediating between the mundane and the sublime. Unfortunately, G.'s morsels frequently have so many flavours that the overall taste becomes almost indiscernible (and for those resistant to theory, perhaps unpalatable), and a texture so dense that one can only take a bit at a time.